A Country to be Reckoned with: 2

By Patsy Trench

In the 19th century Australia went from struggling penal colony to a thriving community with a bright future.

George Matcham Pitt's life spanned the greater part of this century. A larger than life character and a master of rhetoric, fond of quoting from classic poets, opinionated and generous to a fault, GM, as he was known, went from humble farmer to landowner, auctioneer and the founder of one of Australia's first and best-known stock and station agents Pitt, Son & Badgery.

 

This remarkable story is told by his great great granddaughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prefab Publications
• Release date: Aug 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386922636

Book preview

A COUNTRY TO BE RECKONED WITH

The true story of an Australian entrepreneur

Book two in Australia: a personal story series

Patsy Trench

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Copyright 2018 Patsy Trench

All rights reserved

© Prefab Publications, London

This project has been assisted by funds allocated to the Royal Australian Historical

Society through the Heritage Branch of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage

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Reviews

‘This is an accessible approach to history and aims for a wide readership of those who want more than dry history and facts. . . .[It] contains the stories of people to be reckoned with, along with the country itself. Good Australian stories.’

Descent magazine, SAG

‘ . . . a most entertaining and well-written publication. Author Patsy Trench has made it clear what her factual sources are, and where her imagination has filled the gaps, with comprehensive references and chapter notes.’

History magazine, RAHS

Contents

Navigational notes for the e-reader

Prologue 1896 Richmond, New South Wales

Introduction 2017 Wagga Wagga, New South Wales

PART ONE Richmond, New South Wales

Chapter 1 1821 Head of the family

Chapter 2 1821 Staying on

Chapter 3 1824 Scandal

Chapter 4 1820s The Hawkesbury

Chapter 5 1827 The Aboriginal connection

Chapter 6 1820s At home

Chapter 7 1834 Distraction

PART TWO London 2015

Chapter 8 The convict stain

Chapter 9 1807 Crime and punishment

PART THREE Bound for Botany Bay

Chapter 10 1808 Mary and John

PART FOUR Sydney

Chapter 11 The little brown jug

Chapter 12 The smile

Chapter 13 1829 Robert Aull

Chapter 14 1829 Upper Richmond

Chapter 15 Interpreting our ancestors

PART FIVE New South Wales

Chapter 16 1835 Death & marriages

Chapter 17 1835 William Scott

Chapter 18 1835-1838 The land of golden soil

Chapter 19 1838 The big journey

Chapter 20 The drover

Chapter 21 1830s & 2015 Three expeditions

Chapter 22 1838 The squatter

Chapter 23 2015 Moree

Chapter 24 The puzzle explained

Chapter 25 Dispossession

Chapter 26 1840s The price of capitalism

Chapter 27 1840s The women

Chapter 28 1842/3 The law and the Aborigines

Chapter 29 1843 Self government

Chapter 30 1848-1860 Local matters

Chapter 31 1850s Australia and how to find it

Chapter 32 The romance of the bush

Chapter 33 1860s The law and the Europeans

Chapter 34 1850s Birth of a salesman

Chapter 35 1864 Politics

Chapter 36 1864 Railroads and rivalry

Chapter 37 1860s Weddings & inundations

Chapter 38 1860s/70s Manly Beach

Chapter 39 The Mauritian connection

Chapter 40 1839 Anna Sparrow

Chapter 41 1870s/80s Kirribilli

Chapter 42 The North Shore Lazarus

Chapter 43 1879 & 2017 Captain Cook, then and now

Chapter 44 Julia

Chapter 45 1879 Pitt, Son & Badgery

Chapter 46 1885 The world without a sun

Chapter 47 1890s Battling on

Chapter 48 1890s Conclusion

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Author biography

References and chapter notes

Bibliography

Navigational notes for the e-reader

This book contains no footnotes. Sources and references, and extra information – especially for family members – can be found at the end under References and Chapter Notes. To navigate from the text to the chapter notes, and back again, click on the chapter heading in the text (ie Prologue) and it takes you to the appropriate place in the chapter notes. Then to find your way back to where you were in the text click on the chapter heading (ie Prologue) in the chapter notes. Happy travelling.

If for some reason images don’t display properly on your e-reader you can find them, and family trees, on my website at patsytrench.com/bookimages.

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George Matcham Pitt (Elders Ltd)

Prologue

1896 Richmond, New South Wales

On the afternoon of Tuesday 13 October 1896 the town of Richmond came to a halt. Shops and businesses closed their doors and pulled down their shutters. A hot wind blew through the empty streets and a church bell began to toll as a funeral cortege proceeded slowly down the road from the railway station along Windsor Street to St Peter’s Church.

The horse-drawn hearse was accompanied by a long line of carriages containing the relatives, friends and business associates of the dead man – around 150 of them in all. From behind their windows residents of the town looked on. It was the best part of 30 years since the grand old man had lived in Richmond but if they had not met George Matcham Pitt – known colloquially as GM – they knew him by reputation. They’d have known he was born some 82 years earlier in Richmond and brought up on a farm near the Hawkesbury River, grandson of the early pioneer Mary Pitt, the first woman to be granted land in her own right in the district back at the beginning of the century. They may have known that as a young man he travelled on foot to the outer reaches of New South Wales to take up land in the Gwydir district, and later near Wellington, before he gave up farming to form one of the colony’s earliest stock and station agents called Pitt, Son & Badgery. They may or may not have been aware that in his later life he moved from Richmond to the North Shore and served for several years as mayor of East St Leonards.

They would also, some of them, have heard stories of the great man’s generosity of spirit, and of size; of how when GM took a ferry across to the city the ferryman brought along counterweights in order to balance his boat and save it from sinking beneath the mass of his worthy passenger. Of how he regaled fellow passengers with jokes and anecdotes, peppered with quotes from Shakespeare and Robbie Burns; of his readiness to dig into his pockets for those he considered less lucky than himself; his fondness for firing off sharply-worded letters to the press bemoaning the behaviour of the government; his patriotism, his enthusiasm and his limitless energy, whether it was to do with affairs of state or the local community.

However much they knew or didn’t know of the man who had now brought the entire town of Richmond to a halt, there was no questioning the fact that GM Pitt had been a notable pioneer in the still young colony of New South Wales; and that his lifetime, that spanned the best part of the 19th century, had seen the most remarkable changes in the rapidly-evolving country called Australia.

Introduction

2017 Wagga Wagga, New South Wales

I am standing inside an auction house at a cattle saleyards in the country town of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. With me is my brother Tony, who lives here, and a friend called Chris McCarthy, who has spent his life farming sheep and cattle. I am here to get a taste of the life of my great great grandfather GM Pitt, farmer, auctioneer, entrepreneur and stock and station agent in 19th century Australia.

To say this is far from my comfort zone is an understatement. I am a townie, a Pom. I’ve lived in London virtually my whole life. I barely know a ram from a goat, yet I’ve undertaken to write the story of my great great grandfather. That is why I am here: to experience something of the world of country people in Australia who make their living from the land.

The auctioneer stands on a podium, surrounded by a team of ‘spotters’, gabbling incomprehensibly into his mike and now and again banging his gavel to conclude a sale. The buyers, all men and all wearing identical hats, sit motionless and expressionless behind desks, from time to time lifting part of a forefinger to indicate a bid. The objects of the bidding are shoved into the pen and out again before they’ve had a moment to look around and figure out what the hell is going on. Whips are cracked but don’t, I am told, connect. Outside the auctioneer walks along a gantry above the cattle pens, again with his team, all of them in uniform indicating the company they represent, only this time he has no mike and his assistant makes notes on a pad of paper. My fear that by taking photos on my phone I might find myself leaving with a herd of Herefords is unfounded. There is no one here among the buyers who is not known to someone apparently.   

Beyond the auction house pens stretch as far as the eye can see, some containing small huddles of cows or calves – many of them disturbingly young and still looking for their mothers – and here and there a single cow, or a mother and calf. The bewildered-looking animals are fed from one pen to another through clanging gates, mostly by girls, as the selling proceeds. Young men and women ride on horseback up and down between the pens, leaning back in their saddles eating apples and herding the cattle from hither to hence. Everyone wears a hat. It’s like something out of a Western, exotic and industrial, a countryside Las Vegas, a vast, complicated and well-oiled machine that is both spanking new and as old as the hills.

The smell of cowshit is overwhelming and still lingers, weeks afterwards, on the soles of my shoes. It is a reminder, if I needed one, of this extraordinary world, so utterly different to everything I have ever known: the world of my great great grandfather.

~

It has taken a leap of faith, and a good deal of nerve, to think I can understand enough of the world of 19th century rural Australia to be able to write about one of its self-made – and well-known – legends.

I am not a total stranger to Australia. I was born and bred in London to an Australian mother and British father. I even emigrated there as a ten pound Pom in my youth, and while I eventually  returned to live in England I have been visiting Australia regularly over the past twenty years or so, researching and writing about my family history. I know about the country’s beginnings as a penal colony and its fight for survival in the early years; how it was initially regarded by the colonists – or invaders, as some view them in the 21st century – as the worst country in the world; a phrase that became the title of the first book in my family story about my four times great grandmother Mary Pitt. Exactly why Mary, a widow with five children, decided to migrate to New South Wales at that time is a matter for speculation. Suffice to say on her arrival in 1801 she was one of fewer than 40 free settlers who’d dared to chance their arm in what was still a penal colony, and an experiment like no other in history.

What a story that was! And now here we are again, with Mary’s grandson, born and bred in New South Wales, at a time when the newly-named Australia was just beginning to be thought of as a land of promise for new migrants from the old country. In they came, these interlopers, mostly young men who’d heard of fortunes to be made on the land which – since the country had been officially declared terra nullius, or ‘no-man’s land’ by the powers that be in Britain – they had been led to believe was up for grabs. For the most part they were, like me, totally ignorant of farming. (One of them, Edward Bell, arriving in the colony in 1839, admitted his researches were confined to reading books on the journey out. Otherwise, he cheerfully acknowledged, ‘my general information regarding live stock was limited to a confused knowledge of sheep by their distinctive titles of rams, wethers, and ewes, and a vague idea of cattle as heifers, cows, bulls, and oxen, and as beasts that had horns, and made a great bellowing’.) But they had money, most of them, and what skills they lacked they assumed they could pick up on the way. They became known as ‘new chums’, and the locals, born in the colony, took great pleasure in taking the mickey out of them. (They still do.)

When I first heard about the new chums I was both surprised and reassured. Surprised at the chutzpah: to imagine they could travel across the globe, these young hopefuls, to make their fortunes in a strange country doing something they knew nothing about – not to mention the kind of welcome, or lack of, they could expect at the hands of the indigenous population whose land they were intending to take possession of; reassured because I recognised myself in many ways as one of them.

If the new chums could make a go of it, I thought (and many of them did), so can I. Once again, as I delved into the life and times of my great great grandfather I uncovered a story of such diversity and fascination I could not bear not to write about it. I could not sit back and let someone else tell the tale not just of a man, but of a country that during that man’s lifetime transformed itself from a makeshift penal colony to a thriving entity with its own parliament, legal system, sophisticated infrastructure and, above all, its own distinct personality.

So here it is: the story of an entrepreneur who made his living from the land; of convicts and Aborigines, squatters, drovers and bushrangers; of appropriation and dispossession; fortunes, litigation and bankruptcies; births, marriages, illegitimacy and abscondence; of governors, parliamentarians and legislators racing to keep up with the rapidly-changing reality of people’s lives. Most of it is gleaned from newspapers of the day, and there’s plenty of information to be had about GM – in particular concerning his larger than life personality and impressive bulk, his astonishing powers of rhetoric and his fondness for quoting from poets; none of which his biographer would have thought to invent.

But as with any history there are gaps, which once again I have filled with my imagination, as I did with my first book: dramatising scenes and inventing the odd fictional character in order to bring GM to life, setting him within the context of the developing nation of Australia, and including my own observations on the country I have been visiting regularly over the years. Again the chapter notes make it clear what is true and what I have invented. As with Mary, so I have tried to take the reader with me as I embark on yet another extraordinary adventure into my family history.

PART ONE

Richmond, New South Wales

Chapter 1

1821 Head of the family

George Matcham Pitt became head of the family at the age of not quite seven years old.

His father had been on his way home from a business trip to Sydney on a hot January day when, as so often happens in the land of extreme weather, the wind changed and out of what had been a clear blue sky came a torrent of rain as if someone had pulled the plug out of a bath. Thomas arrived at the farm in Richmond drenched to the skin and feverish, and on orders from his young wife he took immediately to his bed.

He never left it.

Soon after, neighbours were summoned to the house to witness his will, and eight days later, on Saturday 28 January 1821, Thomas Pitt, aged 39, died.

He left a 24-year-old widow and five children under seven.

His obituary read:

‘On Sunday morning last, in his 40th year, at Richmond, Mr. Thomas Matcham Pitt, Gent. a distant relation of the late Lord Nelson, leaving a widow and five orphans to deplore the loss of a tender and affectionate husband and parent. His death was occasioned by a severe cold contracted in going home from Sydney; which terminated in a fever that brought his existence to a period in the short space of a few days . . . The probity of his heart could only be equalled by the complacency of his manner; and as he was universally esteemed, so will he now be as universally lamented.’

In my version of events Thomas’s widow, Elizabeth, retreated into her room and did not emerge for several days. The children – George and his five-year-old sister Mary, Robert, William and Eliza, aged three, two and a few months respectively – were looked after by a succession of aunts, uncles, neighbours and anyone else who happened to call round. There were hugs and kisses for the littler ones and a handshake and a pat on the head for George, and a ‘Head of the house now, young man,’ from Uncle William.

Head of the house? What could that mean?

Lacking any other kind of instruction George went about the usual daily tasks his father had set him on the farm: making sure the pigs were fed and their huts cleaned, clearing out the chicken coop, checking for eggs and placing them on the specially-grooved shelf in the kitchen and turning them every day. It had also been his duty, along with William Scott, the adopted farm worker, to move the cattle and pigs onto high ground whenever it rained heavily. Other tasks, such as making sure the horses were ‘looking happy’ as his father put it, came along as and when. But now there was a 200-acre farm to look after, to make decisions about. Was this what ‘head of the house’ meant?

There was only one person George could ask. Uncle William Faithfull, whose wife Susanna had died only a few months before, was too busy locked in discussion with his mother about her future, along with George’s other uncle Sam Laycock, his mother’s brother. Uncle James and aunt Hester Wilshire paid a fleeting visit from their house in Sydney and aunt Lucy, a widow herself, gave him hugs and wept over him for quite a long time. Last to arrive was George’s grandmother Hannah, his mother’s mother. She buried her grandson in her bosom for some time before holding him at arm’s length and saying, ‘Hold up, young man. Your mother and I will soon sort things out’.

But what George needed right now was man-to-man advice, and the only man available was William Scott.

Scott was the only male worker living on the farm at that time who was not a government servant. He’d arrived at Pitt Farm two and a half years ago with his sister Margaret and younger brother James, who’d been sent to live in an orphanage not long after. Quite why his father had taken the family under his wing, and then had young James committed to an orphanage, George never thought to ask.

As a free man twenty-year-old William was entitled to work for whoever he chose, and the sudden demise of his employer left not just the farm but his own future in limbo. Moreover the mistress of the house had taken to her room and looked as if she might never come out. There was no one to oversee the convict workers and no one to make decisions. It could mean opportunity or it could spell disaster. He reckoned he’d give it a week to see what happened and then think about moving on.

He was locked into this thought one morning when he looked up to see the eldest child standing not two feet away from him with his hands on his hips and a question mark on his face.

‘Hello,’ he said to George.

‘What should I do?’

William squinted down at the boy and smiled. ‘Why are you asking me, I’m not the boss.’

‘Yes you are.’ George stood his ground, bare-footed, trousers rolled up to the knee, four square on his little legs, just like his father. It was all William could do not to chuckle.

‘Says who?’

‘I am head of the house now, they told me.’

‘If you’re head of the house it’s up to you what you do, isn’t it?’

The little boy didn’t reply immediately, and William saw he was trying not to cry.

‘Look, I’m sorry about your father,’ he said, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder, which George immediately shook off. ‘But I’m damned if I know who’s in charge here now.’

‘Well I’m the head of the house and I say you are.’

William did laugh then, quite heartily. ‘In that case,’ he pushed his hat back from his face and wiped his arm across his forehead. ‘You could give me a hand with this, for a start.’

‘This’ referred to the plough, which he was at that moment harnessing to one of the horses. ‘Want to give it a try?’ he suggested. ‘Go on then.’ And he stood back and watched as the young lad, with more determination than skill, looped the collar over the horse’s head, wrapped the strap around the horse’s girth and the tug around its belly, then stood back and waited for signs of approval.

William nodded. ‘Not bad.’ He tightened the girth slightly and adjusted the harness at the horse’s neck. ‘Now what?’

‘I dunno.’ George resumed his position with arms akimbo, waiting.

‘Grab holds of the straps, hook ’em onto this, here.’ Now it was William who stood with his arms folded as George fiddled and twisted until one way or another he had the plough attached to the horse. ‘Right, now grab hold of the handles, that’s the way, and crack the whip.’

There was a moment while George looked around. ‘I can’t see a whip.’

‘In that case,’ said William with a smile, ‘we’ll have to think of another way to get him moving. Keep hold of the handles, like that, keep him steady.’ Then he gave a brief whistle and stood back and watched as the great horse, with a toss of its head, set off on its slow journey across the paddock, the small child behind him pushing the plough with all the strength in his stocky little body. The older man called out now and then to keep the horse going and looked on as horse, machine and boy wove an uneven path across the paddock.

It was the start of a tough week. From sunup to sundown George was out there in the paddocks, working away at whatever his mentor told him to do. He learned how to de-burr the horses’ tails and check the cattle for signs of bloat (the extreme cure for which was a knife in the cow’s gut to let the air out). He even learned how to use a stock whip, after a fashion, without garrotting himself. His mentor was tougher than his father ever was, and a lot less protective. When George complained he was tired and his feet hurt William told him it was his own fault for not wearing shoes. When William spotted two convicts having a prolonged smoko round the back of the cattle shed he told the boy to go and tell them off for idling.

‘You do it,’ George remonstrated.

‘I can’t tell them what to do. They won’t listen to me. You’re the head of the house, it’s your job. You’ve seen your father do it plenty of times.’

The boy scowled.

‘And remember not to shout,’ said William as the young lad strode off in the direction of the shed. ‘Your father never shouted. Keep your voice down, it shows authority.’

‘What’s authority?’

‘You’ll soon find out. If they do as you say you have it. If they don’t, you don’t.’

George scowled again and kept on walking.

It took a while, twenty minutes or so, before the government men were back at work. ‘Not bad, for your first time.’ William ruffled George’s hair and the boy flinched. ‘It’s not easy for grown men to take orders from a kid but they’ll soon get used to it. As will you,’ he added as an afterthought.

George learned more in that week than most six-year-olds before him; and perhaps most important of all, the work kept his mind off the terrible loss of his father.

‘You will stay, won’t you?’ He asked William at the end of it.

William shook his head, and then nodded. ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’

~

A week after Thomas’s funeral Elizabeth finally emerged from her room, the baby Eliza in her arms and her brother Sam alongside, to make an announcement.

‘I am letting the farm,’ she said.

There was silence.

‘Just for a few years. I’ve placed an advertisement in the newspaper.’

She had called the family together in the front room. The afternoon light blazed through the window casting deep shadows on the wooden floor. Her four elder children stood in a straight line facing their mother and their uncle, like soldiers awaiting inspection.

It was Mary who spoke first. ‘Where are we going to live?’

Elizabeth glanced at her brother. ‘We’re going to live with my mother,’ she said.

‘In Sydney?’ Little Mary’s eyebrows shot up.

Elizabeth nodded.

‘Why?’ George’s question snapped out like a ball from a musket, louder than he intended.

Elizabeth smiled wanly at her son. ‘There is no one to take care of the farm, darling, it’s too much for me.’

‘I can.’

‘Can you?’ Elizabeth laughed gently. ‘You and who else?’

‘William. Me and William. Me and William have been looking after it already. We know what to do.’

Elizabeth hesitated a moment. ‘I’m sorry George but the decision is made.’

‘What’ll happen to William then?’ George thrust out his chin.

‘William is free to do as he likes. He could stay here, with Margaret. It’s up to them.’

‘What if he doesn’t want to?’ The boy had gone quite red in the face now. ‘William says he doesn’t want to work for anyone else so if you leave the farm so will he.’ He bit his lip, thrust his hands behind his back and crossed his fingers and glared at his mother like the small boy who’s been into the biscuit tin. ‘Anyway I’m not going,’ he declared finally.

‘It’s only for a couple of years darling – three, five at the most. We’ll be back, maybe, when you’re older.’ And then as George stood there shaking his head, ‘You’ll like it in Sydney, it’ll be fun, and you’ll have people to play with, cousins, lots of them, aunt Hester’s  and . . .’

‘I’m not leaving. You can’t make me. It’s my birthday tomorrow, I’ll be seven.’ He added, inconsequentially.

‘So you will.’ Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully. She sighed again. ‘You know I don’t really want to leave either, George.’ She crouched down in front of her son and gently pushed his hair back from his face with her finger. ‘This is the house where I met your father all those years ago. I love it too, and the farm.’ She glanced back at her brother fleetingly. ‘But I don’t see how we can cope, not without your father.’

‘He doesn’t know.’ George pouted.

‘Who doesn’t know?’

‘Him.’ George jerked his head over his mother’s shoulder at his uncle Sam. ‘Was it his idea? Me and William have been working it out. He doesn’t know, he didn’t see us.’

‘This is true,’ said Sam, with a chuckle. He stood at the far side of the room leaning against the wall, legs crossed and arms folded.

‘I’m not leaving,’ George ploughed on regardless. ‘I wasn’t told, and I’m the eldest.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to live in Sydney, we don’t want to go anywhere.’ He glanced at his elder sister and his two younger brothers. ‘Do we?’ he demanded.

They stared back at him uncomprehendingly. Then five-year-old Mary started to cry and, seeing her, the faces of the two younger boys began to pucker. ‘See?’ George demanded, pointing rudely.

Elizabeth straightened up. ‘I’ve already placed the advertisement,’ she said. And then, almost as an afterthought she added, ‘I’ll have a word with William’. She looked into the face of her eldest son and brushed a hand across his cheek. ’All right?’

George glowered, and then nodded, and then stifled a tear, and then stood stiff as a rod while his mother, still holding the baby, once more bent down to envelope him in her arms.

Chapter 2

1821 Staying on

What George’s father Thomas would have made of strangers taking over the properties he had spent nineteen years nurturing and coaxing into submission is anyone’s guess.

The two 100-acre plots were the original grants given to his mother Mary and himself in 1802, soon after the family’s arrival in the colony the previous year. They had named them Pitt and Nelson’s Farms in acknowledgement of their patron Admiral Nelson, whose brother in law George Matcham, Mary’s first cousin, was responsible for the Pitts’ migration in the first place.

In those nineteen years Thomas, with help from his four sisters and three government servants, had transformed their 200 acres from dense woodland into, as described by Elizabeth in her advertisement in the Sydney Gazette:

‘. . . a valuable farm, at Richmond, containing two hundred acres, 150 of which are cleared, with capital House and convenient outhouses thereon erected, has four acres of well cultivated garden, containing some choice fruit trees, forming a complete country residence for a Respectable Family. For particulars apply to Mr [sic] E Pitt on the premises, or, to Mr S Laycock, Toll-gate, Sydney.’

It was here that Thomas had met and married the sixteen year old Elizabeth Laycock back in 1813, when he was 31 years old. It was here that their five children were born and raised. To uproot the children from the only home they had ever known was no small matter.

~

Among the many visitors to Elizabeth’s property at that time was a middle-aged woman I have named Mrs Pursip. This gentlewoman, whom I have invented for the purpose of this story, was what was known in the colony as an Exclusive, or Pure Merino (after the sheep); being, like Mary Pitt, a member of that rare species that had arrived in the colony free and uncoerced.

Mrs Pursip, who was otherwise known in the Pitt household (behind her back) as Mrs Parsnip by George’s father